Writing- sedighe eyvazi
Writing Introduction ' ' ' ' ''' The nature of second language writing (L2) has become clearer nowadays. Broadly speaking, we may say that research conducted in the areas of linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology and sociolinguistics has helped us to gain a better understanding of how the ability to write is likely to be learned. We are now aware that writing is not a decontextualized activity but rather it is embedded in the cultural and institutional context in which it is produced (Kern 2000; Hyland 2002). Additionally, it involves a dynamic interaction among the three basic elements that play a part in the writing act, namely the text, the writer and the reader, which requires writers’ consideration of all them in order to write accordingly (Silva and Matsuda 2002). Needless to say, this view of writing has affected its teaching. In particular, it has stressed the key role that the social and contextual factors play in creating a piece of written discourse. The major aim of this chapter is therefore to explore developments in writing to better justify current practices. '''Approaches to learning and teaching writing The view of writing over the past decades has been greatly influenced by trends in language learning. We will therefore use the language learning approaches described in Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor (this volume), namely those of the environmentalist, the innatist and the interactionist approaches, as the guiding reference points to trace such changing patterns of writing. Writing within an environmentalist approach Up to the end of the 1960s, writing was neglected in the language learning field. This status of neglect grew out of environmentalist ideas which dominated thinking about the way languages were learned. These ideas, which were rooted in structural linguistics and behaviorist psychology, identified language with speech and described the language learning process as a mechanical process based on a stimulus-response-reinforcement chain (see Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor this volume). In the light of this theory of language learning, writing was considered as secondary to speech since it was regarded as just its orthographic representation. It was believed that mastery of spoken language and its orthographic conventions had to precede the learning of written language because discrepancy between speech sounds and orthography could cause interferences with the proper learning of speech (Silva and Matsuda 2002). Accordingly, writing was seen as a language skill which served as reinforcement of ''learning grammatical and vocabulary knowledge, which in turn served to achieve oral correctness. '''Writing within an innatist approach' ' ' ' ' By the late 1960s attention began to shift away from attention to form toward the actual process of composition, that is, towards ways in which text could be developed. This significant change, however, was prompted by the development of Chomsky’s (1957, 1965) innatist theory, which claimed that children are innately predisposed to learn language (see Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor this volume). Thus, with the collaboration of the disciplines of psycholinguistics (Slobin 1970; Brown 1973) and cognitive psychology (Sharnk and Abelson 1977), which showed that children are active rather than passive in the language learning process since they infer rules to test how language works, writers’ mental processes during the composing act began to gain importance. Braddock, Lloyd-Jones and Schoer (1963) were the first researchers to question the effectiveness of grammar instruction to improve learners’ writing and they made a call for teachers to investigate how writing was actually produced. Consequently, research began to focus on the internal processes going on inside writers which were involved in the production of this skill. Emig’s (1971) work was the first case-study that responded to the shift in writing orientation away from product toward process. She analyzed learners’ cognitive processes while writing by means of the technique of the think aloud ''protocol and found out that the stages of writing are not lockstep or sequential but rather recursive and creative. As a result of such a view, learners were taught to become active writers, that is to say, to generate thoughts or ideas and move actively and dynamically throughout their composing processes, that is, from the generation of ideas through to the editing of the final text. Hence, the main role of the teacher, was first to foster learners’ creativity, and then to guide them in the process of drafting, revising and editing their writings (Silva 1990; Kern 2000; Silva and Matsuda 2002). Further, within such an approach errors were considered natural and corrected in the final stages of the writing process. Contrary to the previous approach, in which the teacher modeled the text, in this process-approach to writing the teacher modeled learners’ processes in the writing task (Kern 2000). The written text therefore, was no longer viewed as a vehicle for practicing the language but rather as a vehicle for generating thoughts and ideas. '''Writing within an interactionist approach' By the late 1970s beginning of the early 1980s, attention shifted toward the sociocultural context of the writing act under the influence of the interactionnist approach to language learning (see Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor this volume) and, particularly, with the development of discourse analysis which provided the theoretical foundations for understanding the act of writing. The emergence of this field cannot be identified to a particular school of thought but rather to a variety of approaches that share the common assumption that the study of language in use extends beyond the sentence level. In linguistics, discourse analysis can be associated with the school of linguistic analyses such as formal linguistics (text linguistics) or systemic linguistics (genre analyses). Both research lines extended the grammatical analyses by including the functional objectives (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain 2000). On the one hand, within text linguistics, the research conducted by Winter (1977) and Hoey (1983) was influential since it represented an effort to organize the diversification of discourse in language teaching. These authors distinguished three main patterns of textual organization: 1) the problem-solution pattern, in which a problem is presented in a given situation followed by the response to the problem and the evaluation of the response as a solution to the problem; 2) the hypothetical-real ''pattern, which is characterized by, first, the presentation of a statement which is to be supported or rejected, and then the affirmation or denial of that statement, and 3) the ''general-particular ''pattern, in which a generalization is presented followed by an exemplification of that generalization. They pointed out that readers draw on their conventionalized knowledge of text patterns to infer the recognizable connectedness of text and, therefore, they emphasized the cognitive approach to writing. This approach maintains that what makes writing coherent is not in the text but in the readers’ prior knowledge of the formal and linguistic structure of different types of texts or formal schemata. '''Teaching writing within a communicative competence framework' Over the past two decades communicative approaches to L2 language teaching have emerged. A key influence is associated to the work of Hymes (1971, 1972), who proposed the notion of communicative competence ''in reaction to Chomsky’s notion of ''language competence. Hymes (1971, 1972) pointed out that what was needed was not just an understanding of how language is structured internally but also a better understanding of language behavior for a given communicative goal. Thus, the notion of communicative competence accounted for both grammatical competence as well as the rules of language use that were neglected in Chomsky’s view of language. Since the 1980s the communicative competence construct has been operationalized into different models in an attempt to make the process of L2 teaching more effective (Canale and Swain 1980; Canale 1983; Savignon 1983; Bachman 1987).